Italian painter, active mainly in the Veneto.
He had a refreshingly individualistic style, carrying on the great painterly tradition of Tintoretto and Bassano, reinforced by the example of Liss, Feti, and Strozzi, to which he added his own note of mysterious and sometimes bizarre fantasy. He painted mythological scenes and also allegorical portraits of local officials.
This picture, and its companion piece Perseus Beheading Medusa, exemplify residual Mannerism surviving in the fully Baroque form that characterizes so much of this artist’s style, the consequence of his training in Vicenza.
After studying in Vicenza under Maganza, a late Mannerist painter of limited importance, Francesco Maffei turned to the paintings of Tintoretto, Paolo Veronese and Jacopo Bassano and soon achieved a personal style based on a Baroque reworking of the lessons taught by the great artists of the sixteenth century. Maffei moved to Venice in 1638, was attracted by the painters Liss, Fetti and Strozzi and developed his own version of their free and fanciful modern painting with a gifted, exuberant dreamlike quality. Amongst the most significant examples of this period is the painting of Perseus cutting the head off the Medusa.
The figures, painted with impetuous, disdainful passion, crowd on the surface of the picture and are completely lacking in perspective relationship and in precise setting in their surroundings. The bright tones seem to swell as if as the result of some internal pressure, offering themselves as incandescent magma to the light which breaks them up into iridescent chromatic ornamental units. The sensual brightness of the colours underlines the emphatic strain on the links between the figures, lending the whole an emotional theatricality which was amongst the most visionary and unbiased of the Baroque age in Venice.
The painting comes from the Palazzo Nani. The Tintorettoesque approach of the paintings from the Palazzo Nani reaches a peak of expressionistic tension in the daring perspective view of Andromeda, who appears to have been broken up into a series of disconnected segments.
The painting comes from the Palazzo Nani, where the library ceiling was decorated by Maffei with depictions of the five senses. This painting is an allegory of sight, as may be deduced from the presence of a mirror and an eagle.
